


in these dark and quiet hours

by elsaclack



Series: you'll never know, dear, how much i love you [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Emotional Vulnerability, F/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, a cross of fluff and angst, flungst, tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 14:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12367359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsaclack/pseuds/elsaclack
Summary: There are unanswered texts on both of their phones, lunch invitations waiting to be received, inquiries about dinner plans or post-work drinks demanding responses; there are fresh boxes of his favorite cereal and his preferred brand of hot chocolate in the kitchen cabinets waiting to be poured. Life,theirlife, ebbs and flows along the perimeter of their mattress. But they ignore it for now, for just a few more minutes of this. For just a few more minutes ofthem.





	in these dark and quiet hours

**Author's Note:**

> I PROMISED TUMBLR USERS stardustsantiago AND thinking-in-fragments A PART 2 TO THE ANGSTY REUNION FIC I WROTE RIGHT AFTER 5x02 WHENEVER THAT WAS BUT BC I SUCK I COMPLETELY LOST INSPIRATION FOR IT SO!! THIS MORNING!! I WROTE THIS INSTEAD!! consider it a part 2 if u will
> 
> entirely inspired by one of those aesthetic pics from That Side of tumblr that said “it’s 4 am, you’re sleeping, i’m crying” which was on my dash early this morning

It’s 4 AM.

Jake Peralta is sleeping. 

Amy Santiago is crying. 

It’s not a sad cry, per se, but it’s also not a happy one. She isn’t entirely sure  _what_ it is, exactly - all she knows is that she jolted awake shortly before 4 in a near panic, completely and utterly disoriented. She’d felt his arm around her waist and the heat of him warming her whole right side but couldn’t process it, couldn’t understand what any of it meant, couldn’t feel beyond her heart drumming a dizzying tattoo against her breast and her lungs expanding greedily inside her ribcage. The panic is unfounded, only becoming moreso as her awareness begins to creep in through that panic, but she cannot seem to gain a grasp on reality. 

The arm around her waist tightens in a subconscious squeeze, not quite strong enough to drag her closer but enough to suddenly (almost  _violently_ ) bring her heart crashing back down to a normal rhythm. The body sprawled out in the bed beside her shifts, curling closer - and she nearly jumps out of her skin when a loud, brain-rattling snore rumbles in her ear. 

Relief washes through her at once, so strong it would have made her knees buckle had she been standing. The tears remain steady in their downward pour into her hairline, but as she covers her face with the hand not trapped between her hip and his belly, she almost laughs. He must have stopped snoring for a moment in his sleep, and the sudden silence was so jarring she actually woke up because of it. She’d mistaken that silence for absence. 

She cries because he’s here again, filling up the empty spaces of her bed and her apartment and her life and her very heart and soul. She cries because she hates the silence, the clear and obvious absence of  _him_ , was enough to jolt her out of sleep in a complete and total panic. His momentary lapse into silence was enough to conjure the horrific images of him beaten and bloody and broken that plagued her nightmares all the weeks he was in prison. 

How many nights has she woken from those nightmares just to grasp at cold sheets and empty space? How many nights did her half-awake crying transform into bone-deep, aching sobs she muffled into her pillow (and later, into his pillow)? How long has her chest ached, so empty and hollow, so bitterly lonely? But he’s here now, he’s healing, he’s well on his way to being whole again, and he’s sighing a small and contented sigh in his sleep when she rolls to face him and nestles in closer to his chest. She dries her face on her pillowcase, and a little bit on his shirt, and closes her eyes. They have the day off tomorrow and they have nowhere to be, but she’d rather not waste any of her waking hours without him fully present there with her. 

And it occurs to her here and now, with him wrapped around her just so, that maybe she can start healing, too. 

Her head still spins but the familiar scent of his aftershave, however faded it may be, soothes her raw and exposed nerves. She lets it swell in the space behind her eyes to grow and fill her, to wash away the worry, the stress, the fear and anger and bitterness and loneliness, until all that remains is Jake. 

It’s 5 AM. 

Amy Santiago is sleeping. 

Jake Peralta is crying. 

It’s really and truly the most involuntary reaction he’s ever had to anything in his life, something he would have been deeply embarrassed about not even three years ago. But here and now he basically leans into it, letting the emotions well up inside him and spill out messily into his pillow that used to be hers and her hair fanned out across said pillow. He leans into it precisely because of the here and the now - now being this ungodly hour wherein she’s here without actually being here; a still, soft, silent version of the woman who loves him so much and whom he loves more than anything in the entire world. There for him to hold, but not there to be so concerned that he has to try to figure out a way to word what it is exactly that he’s feeling. 

Which leads him to the here - here, their bed, their bedroom, their apartment, their city, their home. Here in her arms, with her in his arms, with their bodies so tangled together he has no choice but to make the connection in his mind to the essences of their very lives. Here, he’s home; he’s been home since the second they collided at the release point in South Carolina. He’s been home since his tears soaked into her shoulder and she tangled a fist in his hair, their arms so impossibly tight around each other it’s a wonder they didn’t actually morph into one physical being. He’s been home since he craned his head down and kissed her hard, since she rose up to the balls of her feet and framed his face with her hands, since he tangled his fingers in her hair and literally shuddered at her body leaning into his.  

The two grainy selfies he’d fallen asleep staring at every night in prison were complete and total  _garbage_ in comparison to the real living and breathing Amy in his arms. But they were his life jacket in the middle of the ocean, the only things keeping him from completely falling apart, the only reason he wasn’t utterly crushed beneath the weight of that guilty verdict. He’d spent so many nights muffling his tears into that flimsy excuse of a pillow, knowing Caleb could feel the bunks shaking but unable to stop those heaving sobs from wracking through him. He’d reached out to touch the still image of her face so many times that the oils in his fingers rubbed the some of the colors away. He’d withdrawn into himself so many times after seeing something horrible, picturing her face, imagining the words she might have said to him had she been there, imagining how tightly she would hold his hand and how obviously she would angle her body between him and whatever it was that was upsetting him. 

He’d woken expecting the keen chill unique to a prison cell block at night. He’d woken expecting a cinder brick wall inches from the end of his nose. He’d woken expecting the bed beneath him to be jostling slightly with Caleb’s movements above him, expecting the distant sounds of the night patrol guard pacing up and down the block, expecting the general quiet calm of the protected custody block sleeping. 

He’d woken and looked up automatically, searching for Amy’s grainy face posted on the wall above his head, but instead he’d found himself squinting through the darkness at his framed Die Hard poster with his head cushioned on the best pillow on the planet and Amy, the real, living and breathing Amy, tucked securely against his chest. He’d stared, his sleep-frazzled brain trying and failing to catch up with what he was seeing, and she’d nuzzled her face just so into his chest. 

And his entire body suddenly succumbed to violent, heaving sobs. 

He forces himself to slow down after a moment, to turn his face up toward the ceiling to gulp down air so that his heaving chest won’t cause the mattress to quake quite so violently. The last thing he wants is to wake Amy - he knows, he  _knows_ she hasn’t been sleeping well since he was ripped away from her once again, he could see it in the tired bags beneath her eyes and the slow and mechanical way she moves when she thinks he can’t see her. She deserves a good night’s sleep, not to wake up to find him near hysterical by the mere sight of her. Because she’s so wonderful, so perfect, he just knows that if she wakes up now she’ll be so concerned she’ll end up getting out of bed to make him hot chocolate or to warm a blanket in the dyer or some other incredibly thoughtful but wholly unnecessary thing to help him get back to sleep. 

In truth, he doesn’t want any of those things. All he wants - all he  _needs_ \- is her. He never feels more supported or grounded or safe or loved than he does when he’s with her, and it really is like coming home every time he sees her face. 

Slowly, he calms himself; by 5:27 AM he’s back to breathing deeply and evenly, his tears mostly dry in his hair or in the pillow beneath his head. He turns back toward her and carefully pulls his head back, checking to make sure she’s still sleeping soundly. A small crease has appeared between her brows, but as he turns more fully toward her and carefully regains his grip around her, the crease fades and disappears. 

He knows that the current state of his emotional well-being resembles something like that of the aftermath of a massive tornado; he knows he’s right at the beginning of a road to recovery that will stretch on for miles and miles and miles. And it should be hard to fall back to sleep, with that knowledge turning over and over again in his mind. It should be hard to feel any sense of peace whatsoever. 

But peace is literally all he knows as he buries his face in her hair and inhales, the scent of her shampoo and her perfume and  _her_ filling every square inch of him, leaving no room for the fear. He’s got a long road ahead of him, it’s true, but he falls asleep with a smile on his face. 

Because he knows beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that Amy will be there with him every step of the way. 

It’s 6 AM. 

Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago are crying. 

Neither of them are sure who wakes first, or who starts crying first; one moment their bedroom is quiet, filled with the peaceful sounds of Jake’s snores, and the next their foreheads are tilted together and their bloodshot eyes are open and trained on each other and tears are flowing thick and free between them. Their chests ache in tandem, for themselves, for each other, for the keen sting left behind by his involuntary absence that has yet to truly heal. It’s been three days and they’ve been riding the high of giddy happiness that comes with their reunion for that entire time, but it seems this, their fourth morning, is the time for all the sorrow and heartache to finally catch up to them both. They cry together, each hating the sight of the other in such pain, and in the relative quiet calm of the morning, they let themselves fall apart. 

There are unanswered texts on both of their phones, lunch invitations waiting to be received, inquiries about dinner plans or post-work drinks demanding responses; there are fresh boxes of his favorite cereal and his preferred brand of hot chocolate in the kitchen cabinets waiting to be poured. Life,  _their_ life, ebbs and flows along the perimeter of their mattress. But they ignore it for now, for just a few more minutes of this. For just a few more minutes of  _them_. 

They seem to surface around the same time, sniffling hard and blinking away the lingering tears to peer blearily at each other. They’re mourning, and they both know it. Mourning all the lost time. Mourning whatever part of him was lost in that prison. Mourning whatever part of her was lost when he was taken from her yet again. 

Jake rolls away first - slightly, just enough to reach up and wipe his face without hitting her with his elbow - and when he looks at her again there’s a new light in his eyes. He studies her for a long moment, the way her pretty eyes sparkle even with the tears unshed glassing them over, the way her lower lip folds between her teeth. He studies her and it occurs to him that the fact that he never feels more at home than he does when he’s in her arms is no circumstance; it’s just a fact of his life now. He looks down and realizes he’s holding the center of his universe in his arms; he looks down and sees his heart and soul, the love of his life, his future. His right hand climbs slowly up her back and he splays his fingers out wide across her shoulder blades, and as his jaw clenches and his throat contracts with a swallow, he leans toward her, trying to project every huge earth-stopping emotion his heart into hers without words. 

Amy lets her eyes flutter shut as his forehead lightly makes contact with hers again, and in the darkness behind her eyelids, she has a thought - she never wants to wake up in anyone else’s arms but his. She never wants to ache for anyone else but him; she never wants to share this vulnerable part of her heart with anyone else but him. She wants him, only him, all of him, forever and ever, ‘til death do they part. It should be terrifying, because she has no plan for this - just a general, loose five-year stretch (that doesn’t start for another year, thank you very much) in her life calendar marked vaguely as  _ideal start for personal life_ , which is code for  _get married and start a family_. It should be terrifying because she’s made each step forward with Jake confidently, after careful consideration (aside from telling him she loves him for the first time - that was completely and utterly spontaneous). It should be terrifying because it’s six o’clock in the morning and she hasn’t even brushed her teeth yet. But it isn’t terrifying, not even a little bit, not with him looking at her like she’s his sun and moon and stars. She just smiles, complete and utter peace making her clenching heart unfurl, and tucks her head down to kiss his chest through his t-shirt. 

It’s 7 AM. 

Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago are in their kitchen making coffee. In about three minutes, Jake will throw a piece of cereal at Amy’s head, and it will get caught in her hair, prompting a small and contained food fight that will have them both laughing so hard their guts ache. In five minutes Jake will pick each individual piece of cereal out of Amy’s hair. In seven minutes they’ll move to their couch and watch the morning light grow brighter and brighter through the gauzy curtains covering their window while a mindless TLC show plays muted on their television, Jake’s arm around Amy’s shoulders, Amy’s head tucked into the curve of Jake’s neck. They’ll be calm, they’ll be peaceful, they’ll be basking in their individual epiphanies while remaining utterly unaware of the other’s. 

But right now, it’s 7 AM, and they’re healing. Together.


End file.
